Olympic gold medalist Brandon Slay will visit Amarillo to speak about life with Christ.

The problem with scaling most summits in life, Brandon Slay said, is that we always have to climb back down. The view, the satisfaction, seems temporary because the next defining summit is next.

“I was talking with one of my best friends the other day who lives, ironically, in Summit, N.J., and we have these summits we try to reach, but really, they are false summits,” Slay said. “Some are worth going for, but so many seem to fail in terms of fulfillment.

“There’s only one true summit, and that’s a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. You climb Mount Everest and you have to come back or you’ll die. But this one, you don’t have to walk down from. You can stay up there forever.”

Slay returns to his hometown from Colorado Springs, Colo., on Tuesday to speak at the Amarillo Community Prayer Breakfast. He is on the short list — a very short list — of the greatest athletes from the Texas Panhandle.

It’s hard to believe now that Slay’s gold medal in 76 kg freestyle wrestling in Sydney, Australia, was three Olympics ago, that becoming the first Texan to win Olympic wrestling gold was 12 years ago. That’s nearly a third of his life.

Slay is now the resident freestyle coach for USA Wrestling at the Olympic Training Center. He and Tina, his wife of 3½ years, have an 18-month-old daughter, fittingly named Sydney.

The Olympic gold medal has been a point of pride, a window to find out who he really is, a hook for credibility to reach others, but it hasn’t defined him. It might have at one time, probably until 1999, the year before the Sydney Olympics.

That was the year, Slay said, he became an “all-in Christian” while training at the Olympic Center in Colorado Springs. He had grown up in a Christian atmosphere in Amarillo, but questioned if his commitments were superficial.

Entering the biggest year of his wrestling life, Slay was unfulfilled and weary. No matter the accomplishments, no matter the goals, the weight of expectations and lack of contentment made them almost a burden.

“I say this humbly, but when I was 12 years old, I thought if I made varsity in football, I’d really have made it,” Slay said. “Then if I could be a state champion in wrestling, then win three or four state championships, then be a college All-American, then graduate from Penn. It just kept going on.

“All of these things, once you reach them, reach the top, you think you’ve made it. But at the end of the day, they weren’t fulfilling. They were never enough. I was always looking for that next greatest big thing.”

What also was the cause of such unrest was he was defining himself, his worth, by these uncertain targets. Slay was only as good as his last goal.

“So many times in competition, from junior high to high school and definitely in college, I went in not to lose instead of competing to win,” he said. “I had an unhealthy fear of failure, of letting people down. If I lost, people would see me as a failure. I was drawing my identity from success in the world.”

In 1999, Slay was invited by an Olympic volleyball hopeful to attend a nondenominational church in Colorado Springs. Held in a bowling alley, it was unlike any church he had ever attended. But the people and the message hooked him.

He went back every week, where he and others delved into the Bible. Matthew 10:39 shook him and wouldn’t let him go: “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

“I realized that’s what I had been doing my whole life: clinging to my own life and not being fulfilled,” Slay said. “I needed to go all-in. I did, and everything in my life has changed.

“Giving my life to Christ gave me an eternal peace I never had before. It made me realize my identity was not in wrestling or education or hometown, or my upbringing or any success, but my identity was in Christ. That was the foundation that set the stage for the way I started to see the world.”

He felt a liberation, a freedom, that no matter what happened his life and his identity did not depend on an often uncontrollable outcome. His value, his worth, his purpose, was on something much more lasting. That’s what he took into the Sydney Olympics.

“To sum it up, my relationship with the Lord gave me a freedom to reach my potential,” he said.

For more than a month after the Olympics, Slay was a silver medalist, having been defeated in the gold medal match. He was disappointed, but not devastated.

Then, three weeks after the Olympics, Germany’s Alexander Leipold, the initial champion, tested positive for a banned substance. Slay was awarded the gold. It marked him as a wrestler, but not as a person.

“I tell this to my wrestlers that I don’t allow my success to define me, and for some reason, if I come up a little short, I don’t let it destroy me,” he said. “Either way, it’s temporary, and a life in Christ is not.”

Jon Mark Beilue is a Globe-News columnist. He can be reached at jon.beilue@amarillo.com or 806-345-3318. His blog appears on amarillo.com. Twitter: @jonmarkbeilue.

Amarillo Community Prayer Breakfast

The 20th annual Amarillo Community Prayer Breakfast is scheduled for Tuesday at the Amarillo Civic Center North Exhibit Hall. Individual tickets are $5 at the door. Serving begins at 6 a.m., and the program at 7 a.m.